DIGEST 78: And Just Like That

At Auction July 30-August 5

In 2010, I was cast to play Gay #155 at Anthony and Stanford’s wedding in Sex And The City 2 (it has been described as one of the worst movies ever made). My roommate had received the casting call and told me that they were not looking for “a Hebrew face” like mine. Out of spite, I submitted. He was partially right: we were sorted into “apples” and “oranges” (the apples were hotter—I was an orange) and at one point Michael Patrick King (who incidentally looks like a dried apricot) gestured in my direction and requested that they “bring in some apples.”

Me

My troubled history with the film’s casting notwithstanding, I am a great fan of the series. And I have been watching And Just Like That for reasons that are opaque to me. I don’t have a lot to contribute here; read Natasha Stagg on that here. I stand with the general consensus that it is perhaps the supreme artifact of the Biden era—a veneer of identitarian “politics” applied to a consumerist fantasy, animated by a kernel of nostalgia. That said, the show has hit its stride with the last episode because it has allowed some actual conflict to enter its protagonists’ wealth-lubricated lives (this should have happened earlier than episode 9). Of particular interest to Arcades Nation is this week’s first listing, the Vladimir Kagan dining table that has been a recurring plot point this season (Carrie likes the table, Aidan didn’t like it then bought it for her as a surprise, Miranda had all of her shit on it when Carries wanted to show it to Seema).

The table itself is walnut inset with glass. It’s fine. Various gay guys possessing varying levels of expertise have weighed in on whether Carrie would or should like the table as much as she does. I think she would. She was an MCM-Jonathan Adler adjacent Gen X shopper in the original series; she is a very much a 1stDibs shopper now (not savvy or desperate enough to be an auction hound, passable taste with a bunch of cash and a laptop, not a collector of anything but clothes, but requiring some distinction in her interiors). Aidan not liking the table makes sense—he’s corny and earnest: a white guy making “Nakashima inspired” furniture.

I was reminded of AJLT at the Sargent show that’s currently up at the Met. Sargent was the consummate bourgeois painter—technically masterful, when the measure of mastery is illusion—and almost devotional in his attention to rendering the wealth of his society subjects. He was a court painter for the downward and outward spread of wealth in the 19th century, with the death of the old court and its mock re-capitulation in bourgeois society (the “shipping heiress” as noblewoman). More interesting as an index of class sensibility than Sargent’s straightforward orientation to beauty is an interest in the inner psychology of his subjects—they have inner lives that the paintings mean to dramatize, some flicker of humanity under the silk satin (this is historically specific). My impulse on seeing all that beauty was a desire to see it all fucked up, to satisfy the modernist desire for what comes “after the beautiful” and for a sense of the historically-specific psychologies that attend an image that is more than pretty. The surprise then, is to see in And Just Like That that so little has changed—that the silk satin and the dull psychology is all still intact, despite the seeming chasm of history between them. The shows (Sargent and AJLT) suggest the stultifying conservatism of an epoch that we share, and it highlighted some of what is so disappointing and, in truth, retrograde in the new figuratism in painting. See both shows—they’re fun.

Shop the David by David Home collection here. For this month, I am lowering the monthly to $7, annual to $77. Times are hard, support the Vulture.

For my precious new subscribers: Landed cost (the final cost you pay) = the hammer price (the highest bid) + the premium (a set percentage added to the hammer price that the auction house takes) + shipping (you’re always on the hook for this) + sales tax. To the listings!

1. Carrie’s Vladimir Kagan Table

I can so see Carrie paying 8K landed for this.